Equality issues

Novelist Lionel Shriver was part of a panel discussion organised by the Man Booker Prize for International Women’s Day. She observed: ‘This whole thing of treating women specially, as if they need special help and special rules, is problematic and obviously backfires. It is the big downside to the Orange [now Bailey’s] Prize. Having won it, I never want to seem ungrateful... But there is this problem of suggesting that we need help, that men have to leave the room and then we’re prize-worthy. The idea of only publishing women is the same thing.’